


Mare incognitum.

by carnivores



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, Angst, Character's Name Spelled as Viktor, Dark Victor Nikiforov, Little Mermaid Elements, M/M, Merperson Victor Nikiforov, Moral Ambiguity, Non-Linear Narrative, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sirens, Smut, Unreliable Narrator, Virgin Katsuki Yuuri, gratuitous references to paradise lost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 06:57:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11076375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carnivores/pseuds/carnivores
Summary: “I thought you weren’t supposed to covet,” Viktor comments drily one day. He leans back against a rock, sun-bronzed like a marble god. He could surely drive any righteous man to idolatry, Yuuri thinks.“Yes,” Yuuri says, smiling. “But you’re not exactly my neighbour’s wife.”





	Mare incognitum.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a siren!AU with dark!Victor and religious Yuuri. Just going to give a quick extra warning for blasphemy and a lot of heavy biblical symbolism and gratuitous Paradise Lost references. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy! There are no issues of consent in this fic, everything that happens in a sexual context is consensual.
> 
> Mare incognitum: latin for 'unknown seas'.

The ocean surface is dusky, its unforgiving gloom illuminated only by the lone flash of brilliant gunmetal grey in Stygian waters. It is enough to understand.

“Come out,” Yuuri calls into the sea. The sand buries his feet as he steps ever closer, pulling him in deep below. He does not yield. A ripple of water snakes across the surface, tickled by a lone breeze as Yuuri throws a single stone out into the permanent void: aching, longing, calling.

 

_Yuuri remembers years ago in his youth, settling back into the cool tide running across his skin as the sea begins to crest the sun. The sky is darkening like blood-wine, salt hanging thick in the air. Yuuko was backing away into the ocean, her crimson hair wet over her shoulders, skittering droplets everywhere as she smiles, her laughter sailing bright in the buttery warm air. And then the sea parts magnificently, and cruel hands swallow her whole into the black bottomless sea._

 

He breaks open the ocean surface like a glass carpet; emerging into the world of men, he is an emblem of terrible, cold desire and chilling screams at night. Yuuri looks at him with an ache in his heart, scars and blood kisses spelling stories over his chest, empty and bruised and bursting because Yuuri is a fabric stretched too far, and Viktor is the darkest tailor in the sea. 

Yuuri thinks of his books, puffs of breaths of little dark things punctuated by the salty whisper of the sea. The tales told of all manner of things seen out there; on the breadth of the ocean married to the cusp of land, indelibly marred by the rough grains kicking off into its violent, shrieking embrace. They spoke of the softest songs and the sharpest teeth, lilting and irresistible, and dazzling silver-white light that stole the breath of all things, euphonious voice only a bit hoarse from the years and years of salt it had inhaled, the scratchy tortures it had endured. He knows as much.

He knows better.

 

_“Please!” Yuuri screams, beating on the water helplessly as his fists fall into oblivion, water sluicing out of his hand as his knuckles draw inwards. He falls to his knees as the tide tickles his feet. “Please,” he weeps, begging in immolation. His sun-bleached tears kiss the ocean, as it parts to gather them. Drip, drip, drip, it whispers back, and coughs Yuuko out heaving with water entrenched into her lungs. “Yuuri,” she whimpers. Her eyes are glazed as if haunted, and her skin shivery, and her shoulders are drawn immeasurably downwards. Her fingers shake silently and her little wrists tremble alone. He doesn’t understand it at the time. “I want to go home,” she chokes. The whisper of silver glints back at him from the scorching hot waves. Yuuri will not venture to the beach again until he is a young man. He does not forget._

 

He never suspected that one of them would want anything to do with him.

“Viktor,” he exhales, lonely name strangely enticing in the rich tangy air. 

“Yuuri,” Viktor says, his heart-shaped mouth curling into a smile. “You’re a long way from your sheep tonight, my little shepherd.” His long silver hair skims down his shoulders, like effusive white flame. The moonlight refracts off his razor-sharp teeth. Dulling, the sky turns opaque by the ocean moonlight, and the faint glow of the night air trickles down the back of Yuuri’s neck like the warm breath of a predator. Viktor’s shoulders are tense, his arms coiled in elusive strength. Tonight, his lips are bloody.

“I don’t want to fight,” Yuuri tells him.

Viktor smiles wider. He crooks a single, long finger, wordless in a language both of them know.

Yuuri huffs, closing his jacket around him, sealing warmth in. The wind keeps whistling, frigid and raw. 

“I’m not coming with you.” 

Viktor pouts, and the ruby red of his lips is like a nauseating warning siren. He has always been unfathomably beautiful. “Then why should I do anything for you?”

Viktor begins to sing, husky from the saltwater he has breathed, eroding his throat like the grind of sand, and he reaches towards Yuuri. Light reflects against his sharply silver hair, a hazy spectral play of soft and rough light. He is ethereal. The crescendo of his song kisses across Yuuri’s skin, sharply, wetly; but Yuuri is a devoted man, and he does not make mistakes twice. 

“Give Yuuko’s children back.” Yuuri demands starkly. His nails press crescent moons into the skin of his own palms in his pocket. He does not waver.

Viktor is incandescently delighted. “And so Eve came to bargain with the sea-snake?” He asks, mocking.

“No,” Yuuri says, eyes narrowing. “The sword of God comes to slay the Leviathan.”

Viktor is not smiling anymore. The night is wholly silent. 

 

_“Uncle Yuuri!” Axel asks him, on a warm, ebullient day. “Do you know what sea glass is?”_

_Yuuri’s answer is tentative as he concentrates on shearing his sheep. “Is it glass that comes from the sea?” He ventures, tenuous, gradually divesting his flock of their winter coats. Yuuko’s triplets sit under the farmhouse shade._

_“It’s special, coloured glass made in the ocean. We read about it in a book.” Lutz adds, as if waiting for him to simply admit to his ignorance._

_“And it’s our birthday soon, and Mama is afraid of the ocean, and we were wondering if you could get us some!” Loop finishes enthusiastically. Yuuri wipes a bead of sweat from his forehead to where it had formed a glaze over his face, pooling uncomfortably in the bright summer heat._

_Yuuri sighs. He knows where this would inevitably end._

_In the mottled purpled dark, Yuuri creeps across the sandy expanse of the ocean for the first time in over a decade, grain coarse and familiar all at once against his skin. Hardly any sea glass lurks in sight, but for a small kaleidoscopic gathering, ominously arranged by a heap of sediment, like tiny marvels. He picks up a handful, and places them in his basket, where they dazzle like prideful things. He cuts his finger on red crystal, and winces as he draws his finger into the altar of salt-water to staunch the bleeding quickly. His crimson blood is devoured eminently, the inky black waters macabre as the night is aged. His nerves begin to envelop him, as he feels the latent prickles of being watched. Yuuri crosses himself quickly, and begins to pack up. There is a shocking glare of silver light in the deep waters, and a man breaks out furiously from under the sea._

_Yuuri trips over himself in his haste to fall back. He is running like a hurricane is on his tracks, and it is wrathful and godly all at once. The hurricane comes closer and Yuuri begins to pray. He is lit up from the inside, blue eyes and long white hair snaking into the water around him, and he is incomprehensible as he says, voice pitched dark and low, lips curled up, “I think you have something of mine.”_

_“I - I - I’m sorry,” Yuuri stutters back, dropping the basket. It thumps as it hits the sand, and the sound echoes between them. “I’m sorry, I’ll leave it here,” he says, hushed._

_The fish-man smiles again, teeth blinding. Yuuri blinks. “Many find it hard to avoid the temptation. They are exquisite, after all,” the man says, and he doesn’t sound like he is talking about sea-glass at all._

_Yuuri looks down and does not meet his eyes. “I only wanted some for my god-daughters.”_

_The man whistles, colossally loud in the solitary air. Inexplicably, he says,_

_“Come back tomorrow. I’ll have some more for you.”_

_Yuuri grabs his basket and then he is running, running, running; he looks back again. The night is clear. At his farm, he checks on his sheep pen, perhaps expecting blood and guts and unholy acts of demonic sacrifice strewn over walls - but the flock is peaceful, and only the lambs are crying._

_But the next night, when he is done rolling his rosary beads through his fingers, gentle and slow and merciful, he places them idly around his neck and finds himself ambling through the left fork in the road, instead of the right to Yuuko’s house, walking the path back to the beach._

_Perplexingly, the man is already there. This night brings stiller waters though, silent and unmoving but for the absent flicks of the man’s fingers ghosting through the water. He looks up._

_“You came again,” the man states, blunt._

_“Yes.” Yuuri murmurs back, wading into the edges of the sea._

_The man reaches his hand out, placing it on Yuuri’s chin. Yuuri’s heart begins to beat faster, and he thinks were it not for the way he is gently moulded by his ribs, his heart would stave out of his chest. The man’s hand is cold, austere to the touch, but on Yuuri’s face it feels burning hot, like a brand._

_“Tell me your name,” the man commands._

_“Only if you tell me yours, siren.” Yuuri says, unafraid. His rosary beads rattle against the flesh of his neck and he knows he is not alone._

_The man lets go, and laughs. The spell in the air is tangibly thinned. “Surely even you must know of the power of names,” the man says._

_“I give you my word to God that I will give you mine for yours,” Yuuri says._

_The man frowns. “There’s no God here, only me, and I am Viktor.”_

_Yuuri shakes his head, and his beads rattle with his movements. “God is always here, but my name is Yuuri.”_

_“Yuuri,” Viktor says, as if tasting it on his tongue, the sounds deep and resonating. “Tell me, then, Yuuri,” he says. Yuuri prepares himself for the worst of things, of blasphemous dealings on consecrated sands under thick carpeted sky. He steels himself._

_“Why is it that you smell of...animals?” Viktor asks, nose wrinkling endearingly._

_Yuuri laughs, the weight of burden falling low as he begins to feel a charmed lightness in his body._

_“Because I am a shepherd.” Yuuri says, amused._

_Viktor turns closer towards him, eyebrows raised in curiosity. “A shepherd?”_

_Yuuri laughs joyfully again, and begins to explain. The nights begin to fall into place with them, along with this palpable thing between them, growing faithfully, night by night._

 

Yuuri thinks of their first meeting overwhelmed with shame and sorrow, but he cannot bring himself to think of meeting Viktor with regret. 

More than ever, Viktor resembles a fallen angel now. His lips are turned downwards in a moue of anger and his white hair streams outwards, stripped of colour and his eyes, stripped of warmth, and Yuuri wonders, incredulous, if that isn’t exactly what he is. The shadows of his scaled tail play across the water like wings, celestial and wicked all at once.

“I lay myself at your feet, Viktor. I offer you anything you want. Please return my god-daughters.” Yuuri says, agony evident in every syllable and draped over every word and yet, Viktor is still not satisfied. 

“You know what I want, Yuuri.” Viktor says, lazily, tapping his fingers forcefully on sharp hoards of sea glass. His forked tail floats behind him, tap-tap-tapping violently against the surface of the water.

 

_“I remember the days of old, I meditate on all your doings. I muse on the work of your hands. I stretch out my hands to you, my soul longs for you as a parched land.” Yuuri thumbs his favourite psalm with a carefulness honed from years of worship, and tries not to smile when he sees that Viktor looks enraptured._

_“So this Lord of yours understands desire, then,” Viktor says, offhand. He does not meet Yuuri’s eyes. Yuuri instantly grows more nervous, beginning to fold and unfold the page corners of his book, well-loved pages that have seen him through years._

_“It’s not about temptation, Viktor. It’s about pure, holy love. It’s about agape.” Yuuri tells him, feeling this tension between them pulse and stretch like braided rope, knotting and unknotting a million times over. He wishes he could hold it, wishes he could feed it, wishes he could have it._

_“I wouldn’t know about agape. After all, the priest who tied me up and threw me overboard said I was so tempting as to drive a man to sin.” Viktor says, ready to regale Yuuri with more of his false origin stories. Yuuri closes his eyes and lets Viktor’s words wash over him for another night. Viktor is staunchly paradoxical, and staunchly enigmatic. But he is also staunchly wonderful, and more intriguing than anything that has stumbled by and through Yuuri’s life in a long, long time._

_“I thought you said you were born to a mermaid? And before that, hatched to an egg?” Yuuri contradicts, sweet and bemused, breathless in the warm golden breeze._

_“I suppose you’ll have to come in the water for me to really tell you, Yuuri,” Viktor says flippantly, like he doesn’t know what he’s offering, like he would offer it to anyone._

_Viktor’s soft, melancholic hymns hang in the air long after Yuuri is gone, as the distance between them magnifies._

“I can’t come with you. My life is here, on the land.” Yuuri protests, for the third time. It is futile. Viktor is deaf to his objections. 

“Hmm,” Viktor hums, “then I suppose the triplets’ lives will be down here, in the sea.” 

Yuuri feels the lines of tension running through him, taut and profuse, and he wants to scream. He wants to cross himself. He wants to pray.

So he does.

The sand bristles as he falls to his knees here, in the darkness, and he feels the moonlight pass over his skin like a watching lighthouse, never complacent; he moves his hands together, and he looks up in exaltation, eyes bright, feeling illuminated with righteous intent.

“Are you praying to me, Yuuri?” Viktor says, inextricably pleased to be the subject of blasphemy. He has no idea.

“No,” Yuuri says. “I’m praying for your salvation.” 

Viktor slows, eyebrows raised. He looks immensely disbelieving, like nobody has thought of his immortal soul before, like nobody has wanted to alleviate its burden, soften its weight. Yuuri thinks that perhaps no one has. 

Viktor recovers quickly. “Perhaps I was a Grecian god, who knows, Yuuri?” He says, smirking painfully. Yuuri continues praying, indulging in whispers of chants to himself, reveling in the way they sound between his ears and feeling grateful that he had this chance, to pray for Viktor. Viktor, who is beautiful and savage and dangerous, superb and awful and kind all at once. Viktor, who he loves, not in spite of but because of his sins. Viktor, who loves him. Viktor, who would destroy him.

Viktor sighs. “It won’t work, Yuuri. Whatever you’re trying to do.”

Yuuri cracks a single eye open. “Then why haven’t you left yet?”

It goes on like that, with the night marching steadily towards dawn.

 

_“I thought you weren’t supposed to covet,” Victor comments drily one day, Yuuri taking in the expanse of him with his eyes, grateful and wanting; the air is thick and solid with the ardour of summer heat. He leans back against a rock, sun-bronzed like a marble god. He could surely drive any righteous man to idolatry, Yuuri thinks._

_“Yes,” Yuuri says, smiling. “But you’re not exactly my neighbour’s wife.”_

_“Does your neighbour even have a wife, Yuuri?” Viktor enquires, curious._

_Yuuri laughs brightly. “He doesn’t. But he did grope me the last time I went to the market, so that does explain why.”_

_The light mood in the air dissipates rapidly, replaced by a heavy, stone like silence. Viktor looks more feral and frenzied than Yuuri has ever seen him before. He topples Yuuri over, hands on his shoulders, foreheads touching._

_“Did you want it?” Viktor demands._

_“I - what - Viktor -” Yuuri gasps._

_“Do you want him?” Viktor says again, cold and incensed._

_“No!” Yuuri yells. “Viktor, you’re hurting me!”_

_Abruptly, Viktor moved away, pensive. “You’re mine,” he says, fiery and impassioned, looking Yuuri straight in the eyes. He looks like he could be a god of the sea, vigorous and compelling, more than any man Yuuri has ever known._

_But Yuuri knows._

_“I am only beholden to God,” Yuuri tells him, steely and unrelenting, “And I am certainly not yours.”_

_Viktor looks like a shipwreck, abandoned over the seas, hopelessly drifting and drowning. The sea sweeps over him in the foreground as the sun begins to arise and awaken, banishing him back to the realm of darkness. Yuuri leaves._

_He does not look back tonight._

 

“Do you regret that we have lain together?” Viktor asks, mid-way through the night. His inhuman face is marred with frustration, and the desire to only understand what Yuuri is thinking.

Yuuri does not care to enlighten him, not just yet. But this is an interesting question, Yuuri thinks, for Viktor to ask.

“I don’t.” Yuuri says. Viktor snorts, and flops dramatically onto his back, his tail splashing irritatedly. Yuuri smiles at his melodrama. “But I regret the circumstances it was in.”

Viktor looks like he’s secured a little victory for himself in this back-and-forth between them. He claps his hands together, a false mimesis of all of Yuuri’s prayers. “Elaborate,” he insists.

“Viktor, you killed my neighbour!”

“Actually Yuuri, I think you’ll find that I ate him. And what does it say about you, that you let me have you anyway?” Viktor argues.

Yuuri looks up. “It says that I love you terribly.”

Viktor exhales slowly, and reaches out to touch Yuuri for the first time tonight. They could be a shrine lost at sea, for all they look irrevocably intertwined, like celtic knots beaten weary by the elements. Viktor’s hair is splayed out between them, and Yuuri cannot help but run his fingers through it, silver-white strands like precious metals, like the feathers of angels. 

“So why don’t you come with me, into the sea? I can give you everything you want, Yuuri.” Viktor says, sensuous and deep. His lips are apple-red and hypnotic, like red molasses streamed over flesh, and Yuuri knows exactly what he has done for them to be like this. 

He still wants. They are trapped, endlessly, in this all-consuming longing; if only they could step into each other so entirely, like struggling animals, praying for a plague of hands and fingers and nails and moon-shaped scars pressed into skin like a singular entity.

 

_In the glowing, sunshine rich days, Yuuri spends his days with his sheep, and in hazy, dark nights, he spends the late hours with Viktor, but for one day that Yuuko knocks on his door._

_“Come to dinner, Yuuri,” she begs, “it’s been so long. Nishigori misses you.”_

_Yuuri has missed them too, he has; but Yuuri’s days are lost in a holy worship he has only ever known one prior equivalence for, and he is all too ready to be enveloped into it. Still, he says yes to his dearest friend._

_But Yuuko pulls him aside at the end of the night, all the benevolent concern of a longtime best friend, and speaks to him placidly whilst the candles that light the hallways begin to burn out their gas, plunging the world into darkness. “Yuuri, you know Christophe has gone missing,” she starts._

_“He’s my neighbour, of course I know,” Yuuri says, curious as to where this is going._

_“Somebody came to the inn tonight, ranting and raving about seeing Christophe lured into the sea,” she says, and his lovely house of cards begins to topple down over him. Yuuko places a hand over his shoulder._

_“Yuuri, I know you’ve been spending a lot of time by the beach lately,” Yuuko continues, oblivious to the poignant maelstrom that haunts him, the jack-in-the-box that has so untimely jumped out at him._

_“Yuuri, you should know, those years ago at the beach, when I drowned -”_

_Oh, Yuuri thinks. Not so oblivious after all._

_“I understand, Yuuko,” he says, because he does. She smiles with relief. It’s not a lie if it’s by omission, he tells himself. As he leaves, the last candle in the corner that keeps the space between them alight begins to dim. Yuuri blows it out, and says his goodbyes._

_He wonders when he became the person who had to justify lying like this._

_He doesn’t go to the beach that night. Or the next. On the third night, however, he goes._

_He makes out ice blue eyes in the darkness, and then Viktor pulls himself up along with the tide. He looks vicious and bloodthirsty, eyes wild and threatening as he asks, falsely casual, “Where were you, Yuuri?”_

_Yuuri feels a burst of cold run down his spine. “I was busy,” he says._

_“Really,” Viktor says, not a question._

_“Yes,” Yuuri says, anger growing, his hands balling into fists. “My neighbour died, you see. I was making his funeral arrangements.”_

_Viktor stills. “He was an idiot,” he says, as if that excuses him from murder. “He came running when I sang. I’ve done you a favour, Yuuri. He was quite lecherous.”_

_“The second commandment is to love thy neighbour as thyself,” Yuuri says. “You’ve condemned both of us.” He is vibrating with unsuppressed anger, shaking with rage that he has never felt before, he wants to kill Viktor, wants to scream into the water, wants to finally, finally have him._

_Viktor inches forward towards him, closer than before._

_“Did you love him?” Viktor asks, possessive and low._

_“It doesn’t matter!” Yuuri says. Viktor glides through the water towards Yuuri, parting it like a prophet, like an angel, like the devil himself._

_“It does to me,” Viktor breathes, deathly quiet._

_“He was my friend,” Yuuri says. “No, I didn’t love him.”_

_The distance between them is so, so scant; Yuuri feels the heavy puffs of Viktor’s breath on his forehead, hot and ticklish, and Viktor’s hands are pressed warm against his chest._

_“Please,” Yuuri begs, and he doesn’t even know what he’s asking for._

_“I love you,” Viktor tells him, as he leans in and kisses him, saltwater sweet, and Yuuri is a godly man but even he is aware enough to know that this is how Eve took a bite of the apple, red and luscious and forbidden. The serpent beguiled me, he thinks, and I did eat._

_Viktor carefully traces the outside of Yuuri’s lips, soft and full, with his tongue. Their teeth click gently, and Viktor laughs breathily, kissing Yuuri’s smiling mouth; he runs his tongue along the inside of Yuuri’s mouth as his ocean-wet hands slide like a brand under Yuuri’s shirt, hot and cold, the paradoxical sensations distracting him helplessly._

_“Let me,” Viktor says, and he pulls off Yuuri’s shirt, skimming his hands up and down Yuuri’s chest like he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t stop if he wanted to. He licks the dusky peaks of Yuuri’s nipples as they harden in the cold evening air, under the sweltering ministrations of Viktor’s tongue. Softly, he bites down, and Yuuri cries out._

_“I’m sorry,” Viktor says, “if I hurt you. I never want to. I think about you all the time,” he says, as he noses into the heady corner of Yuuri’s neck, biting down, marking him indelibly. Then Viktor chances across Yuuri’s rosary, and starts to leave wet, hot, open-mouthed kisses over the top of his rosary beads._

_“Viktor,” Yuuri gasps, “Please,” he says again, mindless and irrevocably lost. He runs his hands through Viktor’s hair, pulling gently, and Viktor moans, loud and shameless and enchantingly beautiful._

_Viktor begins to kiss a slow, torturous trail down Yuuri’s torso, saliva-wet and sticky as he presses Yuuri into the rough grind of the sand, the tide of water lapping up onto his toes. It feels like heaven. It feels like blasphemy._

_“Yuuri,” he says, thumbing into his trousers, nails scraping rough against Yuuri’s hips. “Do you want me?” He asks, voice guttural and thick._

_Yuuri reaches out for Viktor’s hands, caressing them softly, kissing his knuckles in turn. “Viktor,” he says, unevenly. “I always want you.”_

_Viktor’s hands shake as he slides off Yuuri’s trousers, and then he stops._

_“Viktor?” Yuuri asks, voice cracking._

_“I want you to remember this,” Viktor says, too sincerely, harrowingly delicate and cruelly vulnerable. “I want you to always remember the first time I ever had you.” He says it so, so sweetly, but not in the way apples are sweet, and not in the way cherubs are sweet._

_“The first time anyone ever had me,” Yuuri says, heart rate finally slowing. Viktor’s eyes darken, covetous and immoral. He is wrong, wrong, wrong for Yuuri.  
_

__

__

Yuuri will have him anyway. 

_Viktor bites up Yuuri’s thigh, peppering it with kisses. He licks a stripe up the inside of Yuuri’s thighs, and strokes his calloused hands over them. Yuuri’s moans reverberate through the solitary beach, and the sky blackens. He grasps his cross tightly in his hands._

_“Let go,” Viktor says. “You can touch my hair,” he coaxes._

_Maintaining eye contact, Viktor grips Yuuri’s cock, and licks a stripe up it, sloppy and filthy. He hollows out his cheeks, and bobs his swollen red lips over it. Yuuri is caught in earthly bliss, heavenly sin. He has walked into this temptation with his eyes wide open._

_Yuuri’s cock leaks with pre-cum. Viktor laps it all up, swirling his tongue around Yuuri’s foreskin, mouthing at the slit, humming around it with unadulterated rapture. Yuuri pulls at Viktor’s hair and calls his name; he is coming, blindsided by the strength of his orgasm. Viktor swallows it all, and there is a ‘pop’ sound as he bobs off the head. He licks his lips. Yuuri is shuddering with the force of his pleasure, holy light dispersing through his vision. Static trails through his ears, and he is falling, falling, falling._

_Viktor catches him. He kisses Yuuri. “You taste like me,” Yuuri says, nose wrinkling._

_“Christ,” Viktor says, eyes glassy and wet._

_“Don’t blaspheme,” Yuuri rasps out, no real reprimand in his words. Viktor laughs brightly, and kisses him again._

 

“Do you still think about me?” Viktor asks. 

“Don’t, Viktor.” Yuuri looks away, cold and uncharitable. He wonders if he is strong enough to withstand this now, when he has been so weak before.

“Have you let anyone else have you?” Viktor presses. 

“Maybe I have,” he says. 

Viktor turns around so quickly it gives Yuuri whiplash just to watch him. He rounds on Yuuri, wading through the deep blue sea. The night remains a silent, omnipresent companion to their drama; ever-watching, ever-waiting. Yuuri hopes for plagues of fire and locusts. He wishes for the water to turn into blood. He wants thunderstorms of hail. He needs Viktor to let them all go.

“Who?” Viktor implores, desperate, scrambling.

Yuuri stays silent, eyes wide, all fraudulent innocence and secrets he’s not to know. But Viktor knows.

He grabs onto Yuuri. Yuuri is not afraid. 

“I could sing to make you tell me,” Viktor threatens, a desperate last resort. 

“But you won’t. I gave myself to God, Viktor,” Yuuri says, but Viktor is livid - baring his teeth, he is still savage and glorious, still pandemonium and chaos.

“Yuuri, you’re an incorrigible liar!” Viktor shouts, enraged. “You hypocrite! You let me take you after I had killed your neighbour, whilst his stripped bones were waiting at the bottom of the sea floor, but still you preach at me. You should be afraid of me!”

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil,” Yuuri recites, “He leads me beside quiet waters.”

“I do that!” Viktor points out. “Don’t I deserve the same love and devotion from you?”

“I gave you everything I had, Viktor.” Yuuri says. “You shouldn’t have hurt the people I love. You should give them back. There’s still time to redeem yourself,” Yuuri tries. On the horizon, the moon is waning, as it hangs low. It irradiates the jet waters, the only sign that there is a separation between the blackest sky and the darker sea.

A shadow passes over the pallor of Viktor’s face, bathing him in darkness. “There’s no way I can redeem myself. Whichever way I swim is hell. In the lowest chasm of the ocean, there’s a lower chasm still. I’m only better with you, Yuuri. Please. I want to be in the ocean with you forever,” he starts to beg.

 

_“Yuuri!” Viktor calls from his patent perch on the crumbling rock, fork-edged tail submerged in water._

_“Don’t you ever sleep, Viktor?” Yuuri calls back._

_“What hath night to do with sleep?” Viktor says, content. Then he catches sight of Vicchan, leashed but still cheerful, and he breaks out into a dazzling smile. For his part, Vicchan practically tackles him but for Yuuri’s firm grip on the leash._

_Viktor seems shocked at having such a positive reception, as he absently runs his hands through Vicchan’s brown fur, whilst Vicchan slobbers over his salt-wet face. “I love dogs,” he whispers, awestruck. “But I’ve never met one that felt the same way!”_

_Yuuri chuckles. “He’s mine, of course he can’t resist you.”_

_Viktor looks elated. “Are you saying that you can’t resist me?”_

_“Viktor,” Yuuri says, enunciating every word in amusement, “what exactly did you think was happening here?”_

 

Yuuri considers it; Viktor’s moral ambiguity. The way he, in equal parts, is fascinated by and absolutely reviles God and religion. His untenable curse to the ocean, where he seduces and devours men. His depravity. The way he touches Yuuri like if he touches him enough, he can regain paradise.

Yuuri pauses. “Viktor...are you a fallen angel?” 

Viktor abruptly stills. 

“I’ll give the triplets back. Yuuri, please just come into the water with me. I’ve missed you. I love you.” He cries, hopeless, distressed, despairing.

Yuuri sits motionless. He does not move a muscle, does not blink, does not stutter. Viktor meets him where he is. His chilling hands spread over Yuuri’s shoulders like starlight, and he is scorched. Rotting like boiled sweets on teeth, Yuuri feels his blood ferment like wine. The press of dusk warms the water, boiling them alive, Viktor’s face wilder, more savage and more alluring than ever before. A magnetic force, his aura pulsates, calling Yuuri in like a black hole, but Yuuri does not weep, he does not move. 

Yuuri is lost, lost, lost; the ocean pulls him in like an insistent lover, caresses him wave by wave, calls echoing through the frigid night air - a cold intrusion into the halcyon scene. Viktor’s teeth are sharp, sharp like the cutting cold, and Yuuri thinks of all the screams that must have been lost in the ocean. Rumbling, it starts to force out a vigorous tide that clots in his ears. Finally, it stills, ripples fading outwards into little peals of water. 

“I lack nothing, Viktor.” Yuuri says, eyes fixed to the sky. 

In the distance, the winds sail the ship to the east, and it is lost, lost to the resonant growl of the ocean. Yuuri thinks about the alpha and omega, about the beginning and the end, as the first rays of daylight are promised to the sky, and it brightens with the call of sunrise like a ripe apple. Viktor’s skin is inhuman, like the porcelain of a doll. The water laps up at his feet, and Yuuri looks out onto the horizon as a new day is born.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always to my beta-in-chief, the_moment_is_coming. Comments and kudos are fantastically appreciated, hope you enjoyed the fic!


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